Alexander Morrison

Twin Imperial disasters. the invasions of Khiva and Afghanistan in the Russian and British official mind, 1839-1842

This paper examines two linked cases of abortive Imperial expansion. The British invasion of Afghanistan and the Russian winter expedition to Khiva both took place in 1839, and both ended in disaster. These events were linked, not merely by coincidence, but by mutual reactions to intelligence received in Orenburg, St Petersburg, Calcutta, London, and Tehran. British and Russian officials shared similar fears about each others ambitions in Central Asia, similar patterns of prejudice, arrogance and ignorance, and a similar sense of entitlement as the self-conscious agents of two ‘Great Powers’. By examining the decision-making process which preceded these twin cases of expansion, and the British and Russian attitudes to Central Asian rulers and informants, the paper provides not only a deeper understanding of what provoked these particular disasters, but also of the wider process of European imperial expansion in the early nineteenth century.

Introduction: Killing the Cotton Canard and getting rid of the Great Game: rewriting the Russian conquest of Central Asia, 1814–1895

Russia’s expansion southwards across the Kazakh steppe into the riverine oases of Turkestan was one of the nineteenth century’s most rapid and dramatic examples of imperial conquest. With its main phases sandwiched between the British annexation of the Indian subcontinent between 1757 and 1849, and the ‘scramble for Africa’ initiated by the British occupation of Egypt in 1881–82, roughly contemporaneous with the French conquest of Algeria, it has never been granted the same degree of historical attention as any of these. In general, as Dominic Lieven has observed (2006 II, 3), studies of the foreign policy of the Russian Empire are few and far between, and those which exist tend to take a rather grand, sweeping view of events rather than examining particular episodes in detail (LeDonne 1997, 2004; Fuller 1998). Whilst there are both classic and recent explorations of the ‘Eastern Question’ and the Russian conquest of the Caucasus (Baddeley 1908; Anderson 1966; Gammer 1994; Bitis 2006), and detailed studies in English of Russian expansion in the Far East (Quested 1968; Bassin 1999; Schimmelpenninck van der Oye 2001), the principal phases of the Russian conquest of Central Asia remain neglected and misunderstood. The only works in western languages which examine the conquest from a Russian perspective are brief and chronologically limited, and make little or no use of archival material. There is no equivalent to the studies that exist of British and French conquests and annexations in Africa or British expansion in India (Robinson and Gallagher 1965; Kanya-Forstner 1969; Fisher 1997; Cooper 2003; Brower 2009), or to recent scholarship on the Qing conquest of the neighbouring regions of Inner Asia in the eighteenth century (Perdue 2005). The closest equivalent to an economic analysis as comprehensive as Cain and Hopkins’s (1990) ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ thesis for the British Empire is the pioneering work of Dietrich Geyer (1977/1987); but unlike the former, which has sparked two decades of intense debate and revision amongst historians of the British empire, Geyer’s arguments have produced little in the way of engagement or response (Darwin 1997). If there is no comprehensive account of the conquest of Central Asia in

Camels and Colonial Armies: The Logistics of Warfare in Central Asia in the Early 19th Century

This article explores the use of camels for baggage transport by European colonial armies in the nineteenth century. It focuses in particular on two episodes: the Russian winter expedition to Khiva, and the march of the Army of the Indus into Afghanistan, both of which took place in 1839. However sophisticated their weapons and other technology, until at least the 1880s European colonial armies were forced to rely exclusively on baggage animals if they wanted to move around: railways arrived very late in the history of European expansion. In Central Asia this meant rounding up, loading, managing and feeding tens of thousands of camels, which could only be furnished by the pastoral groups who inhabited the region, who in some cases were also the objects of conquest. Camel transport placed certain structural constraints on European conquest in Central Asia: firstly it meant that the forces involved were almost always very small; secondly it prevented the launching of spontaneous or unauthorised campaigns by “men on the spot,” as every advance had to be preceded by the rounding up of the necessary baggage animals, and the creation of a budget to pay for then. Finally, the constraints imposed by camel transport ensured that British and Russian armies would never meet in Central Asia, and that a Russian invasion of India was a chimera.

‘Nechto eroticheskoe’, ‘courir après l'ombre’? – logistical imperatives and the fall of Tashkent, 1859–1865

This article explores the debates that preceded the Russian conquest of Tashkent in 1865. It argues that none of the explanations usually given for this – the ‘men on the spot’, ‘cotton hunger’, or the Great Game with Britain – is satisfactory. Instead, it shows that the War Ministry and the governors of Orenburg had advocated the capture of Tashkent from the late 1850s, and that General Cherniaevs assault in 1865 was at least tacitly authorized. The motives for the Russian advance combined the need for better supply chains to the steppe fortresses, a desire to ‘anchor’ their new frontier in a region with a sedentary population, and concern for security from attacks by the Khoqand Khanate. Economic considerations and rivalry with Britain played very minor roles.

White Todas: the politics of race and class amongst European settlers on the Nilgiri Hills, c. 1860-1900

The Nilgiri Hills lie in the north-western corner of what is now Tamil Nadu, and was formerly part of the Madras presidency. Before 1799 the Hills had formed a rather detached part of Tippoo Sultan’s Mysore. Although they do appear to have paid revenue, their various tribes lived in comparative isolation, broken only in 1819 when the first European bungalow was constructed on the lower slopes near Kotagiri by the collector of the Coimbatore District. From the 1820s onwards the Hills, and particularly Ootacamund (Ooty), the chief sanatorium, became a popular resort for invalid Europeans, revelling in the ‘half-English’ weather of the plateau, 6,000 feet above sea level. From the 1850s they became fashionable, as well as a health resort, and by 1870 Ooty was acting as the summer capital of the Madras presidency, the seat of government for four to six months of the year. Nevertheless, with an average population density of no more than 127 per square mile in 1901, less than any other district in Madras, and a main town, Ootacamund, of only 18,500 inhabitants, the Nilgiris were of minor economic and demographic significance, and have accordingly attracted little attention from historians since the publication of Sir Frederick Price’s voluminous history in 1908. With or without the familiar diminutive, Ooty is always belittled by the associations of the term ‘hill station’. In imperial and nationalist mythology this implies a place apart, Kipling’s ‘abode of the little tin gods’, divorced from the everyday concerns of the ‘real’ India on the Plains. Dane Kennedy’s The Magic Mountains and Pamela Kanwar’s Imperial Simla are the principal detailed studies of this peculiar urban form, and show clearly that hill stations were no different from other Indian towns in depending on Indian capital and enterprise for their maintenance and development. Despite this, Kipling’s grass-widows and dashing young subalterns still hold centre stage in the popular perception of the hill station, obscuring not only the Indians who made this brittle existence possible, but the substantial numbers of Europeans who came to the hills not to play, but to work. Together with the presidency towns, but for somewhat

Amlākdārs, Khwājas and Mulk land in the Zarafshan Valley after the Russian Conquest

This paper attempts to examine the transition from Bukharan to Russian rule in the Zarafshan Valley, and early Russian attempts to understand and adapt Bukharan systems of taxation and land tenure to their purposes. It concentrates in particular on the decision to abolish an important Bukharan tax-collecting office, that of amlakadr, and the refusal of the Russians to recognise the tax privileges attached to certain types of mulk land in the region. The Persian and Chaghatai chronicles which are the focus of most existing work on Islamic Central Asia contain little information on questions on nature of taxation and land tenure in the nineteenth-century Bukharan Emirate. As they created their land revenue system, the Russians sought to break the power both of Uzbek tribal elites represented by the amlākādrs and of religious elites, namely the sayyids and khwajas who, they believed, were the main beneficiaries of the tax exemptions on mulk land. Keywords:amlākādrs; Bukharan Emirate; khwajas ; land revenue system; mulk land; Russians; Uzbek tribal elites; Zarafshan Valley

The ‘Turkestan Generals’ and Russian Military History:

This article is a short collective biography of six so-called ‘Turkestan Generals’, all of whom played a prominent role in the Russian conquest and administration of Central Asia. These campaigns are usually seen as marginal to the military history of the Russian empire in the nineteenth century, but they were central to the reputations of three of the most prominent generals of the period, who became important public figures – Cherniaev, Skobelev, and Kuropatkin. The article shows that this was not accidental, but the product of a carefully constructed narrative in Russian military historiography.

Ter Minassian, Taline Most Secret Agent of Empire: Reginald Teague-Jones, Master Spy of the Great Game Trans. Tom Rees New York: Oxford University Press 283 pp.,

This lively, patchwork account of a highly elusive figure, by a distinguished historian based at Pariss Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO), should appeal to both a popular ...

29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-021076-2 Publication Date: September 2014

This article provides an introduction to one of the lesser-known examples of European settler colonialism, the settlement of European (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) peasants in Southern Central Asia (Turkestan) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It establishes the legal background and demographic impact of peasant settlement, and the role played by the state in organising and encouraging it. It explores official attitudes towards the settlers (which were often very negative), and their relations with the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz population. The article adopts a comparative framework, looking at Turkestan alongside Algeria and Southern Africa, and seeking to establish whether paradigms developed in the study of other settler societies (such as the ‘poor white’) are of any relevance in understanding Slavic peasant settlement in Turkestan. It concludes that there are many close parallels with European settlement in other regions with large indigenous populations, but that racial ideology played a much less important role in the Russian case compared to religious divisions and fears of cultural backsliding. This did not prevent relations between settlers and the ‘native’ population deteriorating markedly in the years before the First World War, resulting in large-scale rebellion in 1916.

Peasant Settlers and the ‘Civilising Mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865–1917

Russian Turkestan1 was administered under what was known as Voenno-narodnoe upravlenie or ‘Military-Popular Government’,2 asystemdatingin its essentials from Catherine the Great’s administrative reforms of 1775, as extended by Speransky in Siberia and Bariatinsky in the Caucasus.3 The variant introduced in Turkestan closely resembled that introduced in the mountainous regions of the North Caucasus after 1864.4 The governors of provinces under this system normally had the rank at least of major-general, and the senior chinovniki or civil servants were army officers seconded from their units to perform administrative, judicial, medical and even educational duties. Whilst civilian chinovniki could be clerks, surveyors and accountants, almost all jobs that involved executive or judicial power were filled by military officers, and this remained the case until the Revolution. Apart from the Military Governors and those who served in the governor-general’s Chancellery and Sovet, the most important official posts were those of uezdnoi nachal’nik [district commandant]5 and their assistants, and the local police chiefs or uchastkovye pristavy. Below these executive positions power was almost entirely devolved to a separate ‘native administration’.6 The zemstva, or provincial elected assemblies, together with the independent civilian courts which had been created by Alexander II’s reforms after 1864, did not exist in Turkestan or the other Asiatic military governorships, which placed a very heavy burden on these officers, and this created an administrative division between metropolis and periphery in the Russian empire which is often overlooked.